One In A Million Shot

I'm sure most of you out there are familiar with the expression: "You couldn't do that again if you were trying." For those of you who aren't, it basically means that something very lucky happened to cause a ball to bounce a certain positive way, a nail to go in on the first try or some other activity that should have taken multiple attempts to succeed only took one. However, I've discovered that it is never actually used in this way, because no one uses it after they do something good. Instead people only break this phrase out after something bad happened. For example, I will say it when playing golf and finding myself trying to hit through trees (which happens a lot). I never connect with the forty to fifty thick branches in my way, but get through all of those only to nail the smallest, thinnest, highest and final branch dead-center. Never would have come close if I was aiming for it, but in trying to avoid it I was spot on. Hence, I couldn't do that if I was trying.

Well this afternoon I had an all-timer: after pumping gas at my local station I was trying to get back into my car when the driver-side door refused to open back up. Didn't matter how hard I pulled or whether I tried the inside or outside lever, it wasn't budging. Since I was at the busiest gas station in the area I didn't think it was right to make the other ten cars in line wait while I used the pump area to figure out the problem and since I also wasn't about to climb through my open driver's side window like one of the Duke boys, I ended up going around my truck, entering through the passenger's side and then climbing over the center console, which is when I notice the problem. I then drove home without getting a good chance to fix it, visions of broken locking mechanisms that required hundreds of dollars to be repaired dancing in my head.

Fortunately, it wasn't nearly that bad. Turns out that as I was getting out of my car to get gas I, unbeknownst to me, closed the door on my seat belt. Normally not that big of a deal except that during that motion of closing the door the belt had managed to slide between the teeth of the locking mechanism and were now so in the way the teeth couldn't open enough to release the door. Pulling on the inside handle of the door while giving it one good shoulder block was enough to get the door open, so I could take a better look, but it didn't get the belt free. What was amazing to me was that the belt had slid between the teeth in the half-second they were still open and managed to slide through an opening with about a millimeter of clearance on either side. If I had been sitting there trying to do this it would have taken me a half-hour and three dozen tries.

I know this because getting the belt to slide back out proved to be a lot harder than getting it in. It wasn't just that the belt had gotten crammed in the door, it had wound its way around the lock. It was a process of holding the door handle with one hand while trying to shimmy the belt out with the other. In the end I just ended up pulling the hell out of the belt and causing a minor hole. (Just goes to show how tight it was in there.) You know, reoccurring problems in a car are usually something I worry about, but something tells me this one isn't happening twice. If it does, rest assured, it will have happened without me trying to do it.